The Lightness Of Being
by coeur de lyon
Summary: All kunoichi have wills of fire. Except for one. Tenten's past fic


**Diclaimer: Don't see why i should have to do this. They should really be watching for the CLAIMERS, not the broke antipodean teenagers. Sheesh.**

The Lightness of Being

_For Ira_

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_You want your child to have more than you ever did. You want to build a fire underneath her and watch her soar.  
_- My Sister's Keeper

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It's cold up high. And very quiet. And the sun shines so much more brightly, up here where the air is thin and she is entirely alone. Why does Tenten soar so high? _How_ can she go so high? Team Guy, her team, possessed with a kind of brilliance few others can match, even within the Konoha Eleven, have nothing on her in the sky.

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Watching her in battle, reckless and cruel and beautiful, Guy remembers the little girl whose dreams had been as lofty as Lee's, even if he hadn't paid them so much attention. As Tenten plummets down and down and _down so far _towards the unforgiving earth, pulling herself out of her dive just in time to destroy her enemy and not herself, he feels a soft awe for this wild young woman (whose spirit isn't contained within herself like other kunoichi of her generation, because she set it free long ago.) who laughs with glee as she freefalls down and down and _down_ _again_, catching a Star-nin who thought he could take her on in this domain. To his cost. And Guy thinks to himself that this, _this _is how people are meant to be.

_But Icarus was one such who flew that close to heaven, too_

_And we all know what happened to him._

And why is she alone up there?

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Lee watches her swoop and soar and feels so _proud_ of her. He loves Sakura, loves her with every fibre of his spandex green being, but he knows she is a different sort of strong than this. All kunoichi have wills of fire. Except for one. In the sky, that high up, the world is only cold and blue and distant. And Tenten's determination burns like ice.

And he finds himself kind of wondering what it must be like to have wings like that, because Tenten makes it look so easy, but he _knows_ that _it must be_ hard, (because he goes up to her afterwards, visits her in the field hospital, wrapped up like an instant meal in a foil blanket because it's _too_ cold that high, and she went in anyway.) and as she reaches out for his hand, he knows, too, that it will burn him nearly more than he can bear. But he takes it anyway.

_Because she is erratic now, and when she answers that call of utter insubstantialness, she needs all the lifelines she can get to come back when it is done_

_It gets harder and harder._

And he watches her sleep and wonders who led (and left) her up there in the first place.

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Neji loves watching her this way more than he will say. Watching her soar like that fills him with a kind of exhilaration he doesn't understand. And a kind of envy he strives to ignore. Because he burns bright as the sun, but she is the everything in between. And she tries and tries and _tries her hardest_ to show him how to fly that way, (not _her _way, she wouldn't wish that on anyone) but he doesn't think he can. And one night when they fight and he shouts that she can't understand what it's like for him, she feels like slapping him then and there. But she doesn't. Instead she fixes him with a cold look (because there is a hairline fracture in the surface of her soul, and a fissure down deep into her glacial heart and she has much coldness to draw on when she needs)  
and she flies away.

_(To her sensei, to his bed. Feeling through her entire being how the wholeness Guy brings her complements the deterioration of her insides)_

The next day she transfers to another team.

_If you cannot fly on love, you are tied down by hate._

And he wishes he knows what he did wrong, on nights when he takes fangirls or sleeping pills to bed instead of she who has been loved and hurt away.

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_Up high the air is thin. Less oxygen molecules and more Other Stuff making up the air. More Space between particles. More cracks to fall through - and down._ So far.

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Tenten is transient. Of wind and sky and air. Fast changing. Flight-y. Loved by all (but not beloved.) With one hell of a Clark Kent sort of secret. No one asks her though, because there is no slipping out of character (except for that one time when Neji had pushed her too far (away)…) because she has made herself Airtight. And even on good days, when the sky is limpid blue and secret free she feels kind of bitter about it. (And there's not really much point in saying how she feels on those wild stormy days when the world is cast in grey-yellow light,, knowing there will be rain tonight…  
No. There's no point in saying that at all.)

What is her secret? That which Neji recognises (months later) in a fearing moment, that she will fly away from him forever, isn't much of a secret at all.

_Why _she can fly that high –

Is 'cause there's nothing holding her down. There are no foundations, no emotional connections to anyone she should love. Those twisting clinging strings of relationships between people were severed when she was a child.

It is something of a blessing, she supposes, that she has no clear recollections of that time, not really. Her subconscious has played a wonderful role in forgetting things for her. She only has bits of a memory. (She remembers a gasolyne rainbow, pooled on a concrete floor, and she remembers vice like arms holding her, whispering to her to _look away, Tenten_.) And the bits are too small to hurt so sharply now._ This is what she tells herself, anyway. The weapons mistress has never bothered to investigate the effects of corrosion. (People are wrong when they call her merciless._)

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She remembers an ambulance on a road she doesn't recognise. She remembers chasing after it, fruitlessly, down the road, eyes fixed on the last visible spot of the funny white box long after it had gone. She remembers standing in the road (and she doesn't think it's a Konoha one, when she chances to think on it, this one time...) and her polarity reversing itself. She didn't sink like the other Konoha kids, That day when she was cut out. She found a way to release the pressure building up in her (the pain that made her companions denser than should be possible, that made them sink down and down and _down into the very bones of things)_ but in her eagerness she poured too much of herself out.

And she floated away.

_A Lightness of Being._

Tenten doesn't talk about her home because there's no home to talk about. It gets easier to pretend though. Practice does make perfect (she's been in dress rehearsal for a decade) . She knows there are other memories floating inside her like oil slicks on the sea, just waiting to pollute her sound-of-mind-and-bodyness but for now she is good. In the sky, there you feel free. And so be it if she is alone up there (Bereft, dangerous) Liberty is something to be cherished  
(even more so when you are the only one who knows)

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_Ka Mutu_

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A/N: Erm yeah. Going on a 'well you know how Tenten doesn't have herself a story?' thing, I went off on a neglectful tangent. Neglect and possible abandonment, and some domestics too, to be precise, actually. There are things that no one ever picks up on, when you know how to hide them well enough. **Do I actually believe that anything like this would have happened to a someone like Tenten?** It does happen to someones like her, but I don't think it woulda happened to her, herself. If that makes sense. As I said this was a completely tangential exercise in procrastination. This came out of my head instead the HUGE amount of recall/revision i should be doing for the end of year exams. See its nearly summer here, and my entire school year will be over in 6 weeks :D (blatant gloating n.n)

Tonnes of lil references to a gazillion things. Incl but not ltd to ts eliot, shakespeare, arctic monkeys, some books, some more song lyrics, some movies, some other stuff…Ooh yeah. Slight wince for the light night rhyme, couldn't help myself. Reference too good an opportunity to pass up n.n If you understand it/them, it should make more sense from a where i was coming from pov.

Condimenty music:** sail to the moon (brush the cobwebs from the sky) by Radiohead** (even if it is kinda sorta freaky…it's beautiful freaky. Like a gothic and lolita girl n.n man; if i could afford it, i'd so totally dress up like that)

Cheers for reading


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